Suchergebnisse

The 2008 election of President Barack Obama represents a halcyon moment in U.S. history. President Obama's election begs a critical question: whether his nationwide landslide victory catapulted the United States, with its sordid racial past, into a truly post-racial place as many claim. While Obama's election was possible due to important changes that have taken place in the United States in the past fifty years, the reality is that profound disparities continue to exist between minority and white Americans that show no sign of dissipating during this Obama presidency. Of these profound disparities, some of the most striking include those in the United States prison population, where 55% of all federal prisoners are African American while only 13% of the U.S. population is black. Further, the academic achievement gap between blacks and whites persists even for the black middle class, continuing to fuel theories of white supremacy and black inferiority. In a society where 74% of black Americans have personally experienced racial discrimination and where 76% of African Americans believe that they do not receive equal treatment from the police, the claim of post-racialism rings hollow. In arguing that much hard work remains before Americans can authentically claim a post-racial arrival, this Essay examines the recent 2008 financial market crisis as well as several recent isolated instances of American racial disharmony (Henry Louis Gates, Shirley Sherrod and Jordan Miles), in order to lay bare any post-racial claim.

Introduction -- Professionalizing and palatable "blackness" -- Branding and marketing "blackness" -- From stumbling block to stepping stone -- Owning the "ghetto" shows -- Rules of engagement: the politics of race, gender, and sexuality -- Barack and Michelle Obama as signs of progress and threat -- Concluding remarks

The social and legal relevance of racial passing appears to be fading as we ostensibly enter a color-blind, post-race era. During the "Age of Obama," the notion of passing in our multi-racial society seems to many to be antiquated and unnecessary. As the nation has moved beyond state-sanctioned racial discrimination, many believe that the country also has moved beyond the need for a legal dialogue on racial passing and ambiguity. This "retreat from race," exemplified in part by the apparent declining significance of racial passing, proclaims that the state no longer should consider race when interpreting the law or incorporating democratic values of equality and opportunity. This Essay, however, argues that the continued phenomenon of racial passing can be utilized as a conceptual vehicle to destabilize and de-legitimatize the post-racial agenda.

Black politics : which way is left? -- Race and money in politics -- Black tea : Black conservatives and the rhetoric of social conservatism -- Contradictions in a "Latino moment" : Latinos as less Black? -- Triangulation 101 : the old conceives the new -- The new triangulation : Barack Obama and post-racialism -- A thousand Obamas : race and electoral ambition -- Do Blacks need a Black President? : of movements, not men

Focusing on the postracial drive to undermine racism through its purported universalization, the paper is aimed at analyzing, from a critical race studies perspective, how the 'racial eliminativist' demands, that underlie postracialist projects, paradoxically, crystallize into new forms of racial deniability, which I study through the contemporary expressions of 'not racism'. Thus the argument is not about the existence of race as a factor determining social and political relations, hence 'anti-racialism', but rather about the establishment of definitions of racism that either sideline or deny race both as an historical phenomenon and as experienced by racialised people, on the one hand ; push for a dominant interpretation of racism as a moral one which sutures it to assessments of individual character, on the other hand. Three key facets of this 'not racism' will be put under scrutiny : the tendency to oppose race and class ; the alleged 'unhelpfulness' of racism; and the so called 'elitism' of antiracism.